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Out Today: The Blood Telegram and a ‘Forgotten Genocide’ in South Asia

In 1971, responding to a treaty of friendship signed between India and the USSR, Henry Kissinger threw his weight behind Pakistan in the Bangladesh Liberation War. He feared the metastasizing influence of the Soviet orbit and wished to nip it in the bud of South Asia.

America’s involvement in the affairs of India and Pakistan are emblematic of most mid-20th century crises. While they were ostensibly limited in scope to the regional independence movements and government shuffles (Korea, Vietnam), they were, to American politicians, pawns in a chess match with Communism. For decades, the shadow of the Soviet Union was cast across our war room maps.

This Red-tinted view had the effect of warping our perception, our motives and our missions in nearly every country we became entangled with. In The Blood Telegram, Gary J. Bass tells a fascinating tale of how Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon became embroiled in the affairs of Pakistan and their bloody clash with “East Pakistan,” or present day Bangladesh. In what is frighteningly reminiscent of how growing Jewish persecutions in 1930s Germany were met with diplomatic indifference, Nixon and Kissinger repeatedly ignored the cries of diplomats convinced of an impending genocide.

In effect, our leaders were “driven not just by Cold War realpolitik but by a bitter personal dislike of India and its leader Indira Gandhi.” The United States’ backing of Islamabad, Bass argues, irreversibly altered Asia’s destiny in the latter half of the twentieth century. This is a “revelatory, compulsively readable work of politics, personalities, military confrontation, and Cold War brinksmanship,” one we’ve excerpted below for your enjoyment.

Archer Blood, the United States consul general in Dacca, was a gentlemanly diplomat raised in Virginia, a World War II navy veteran in the upswing of a promising Foreign Service career after several tours overseas. He was earnest and precise, known to some of his more unruly subordinates at the U.S. consulate as a good, conventional man.
He had come to like his posting to this impoverished, green, and swampy land. But outside of the consulates grimy offices, in the steamy heat, the city was dying. Night after night, Blood heard the gunshots. On the night of March 25, 1971, the Pakistan army had begun a relentless crackdown on Bengalis, all across what was then East Pakistan and is today an independent Bangladesh. Untold thousands of people were shot, bombed, or burned to death in Dacca alone. Blood had spent that grim night on the roof of his official residence, watching as tracer bullets lit up the sky, listening to clattering machine guns and thumping tank guns. There were fires across the ramshackle city. He knew the people in the deathly darkness below. He liked them. Many of the civilians facing the bullets were professional colleagues; some were his friends.
It was, Blood and his staffers thought, their job to relay as much of this as they possibly could back to Washington. Witnessing one of the worst atrocities of the Cold War, Bloods consulate documented in horrific detail the slaughter of Bengali civilians: an area the size of two dozen city blocks that had been razed by gunfire; two newspaper office buildings in ruins; thatch-roofed villages in flames; specific targeting of the Bengalis Hindu minority.
The U.S. consulate gave detailed accounts of the killings at Dacca University, ordinarily a leafy, handsome enclave. At the wrecked campus, professors had been hauled from their homes to be gunned down. The provost of the Hindu dormitory, a respected scholar of English, was dragged out of his residence and shot in the neck. Blood listed six other faculty members reliably reported killed by troops, with several more possibly dead. One American who had visited the campus said that students had been mowed down in their rooms or as they fled, with a residence hall in flames and youths being machine-gunned.1
At least two mass graves on campus, Blood cabled. Stench terrible. There were 148 corpses in one of these mass graves, according to the workmen forced to dig them. An official in the Dacca consulate estimated that at least five hundred students had been killed in the first two days of the crackdown, almost none of them fighting back. Blood reckoned that the rumored toll of a thousand dead at the university was exaggerated, although nothing these days is inconceivable. After the massacre, he reported that an American eyewitness had seen an empty army truck arriving to get rid of a tightly packed pile of approximately twenty five corpses, the last of many such batches of human remains.2

This was, Blood knew, the last thing his superiors in Washington wanted to hear. Pakistan was an allya military dictatorship, but fiercely anticommunist. Blood detailed how Pakistan was using U.S. weaponstanks, jet fighters, gigantic troop transport airplanes, jeeps, guns, ammunitionto crush the Bengalis. In one of the awkward alignments of the Cold War, President Richard Nixon had lined up the democratic United States with this authoritarian government, while the despots in the Soviet Union found themselves standing behind democratic India.
Nixon and Henry Kissinger, the brilliant White House national security advisor, were driven not just by such Cold War calculations, but a starkly personal and emotional dislike of India and Indians. Nixon enjoyed his friendship with Pakistans military dictator, General Agha Muhammad Yahya Khan, known as Yahya, who was helping to set up the top secret opening to China. The White House did not want to be seen as doing anything that might hint at the breakup of Pakistanno matter what was happening to civilians in the east wing of Pakistan.
The onslaught would continue for months. The Dacca consulate stubbornly kept up its reporting. But, Blood later recalled, his cables were met with a deafening silence. He was not allowed to protest to the Pakistani authorities. He ratcheted up his dispatches, sending in a blistering cable tagged Selective Genocide, urging his bosses to speak out against the atrocities being committed by the Pakistani military. The White House staff passed this up to Kissinger, who paid no heed. Then on April 6, two weeks into the slaughter, Blood and almost his entire consulate sent in a telegram formally declaring their strong dissenta total repudiation of the policy that they were there to carry out. That cableperhaps the most radical rejection of U.S. policy ever sent by its diplomatsblasted the United States for silence in the face of atrocities, for not denouncing the quashing of democracy, for showing moral bankruptcy in the face of what they bluntly called genocide.3

This book is about how two of the worlds great democraciesthe United States and Indiafaced up to one of the most terrible humanitarian crises of the twentieth century. The slaughter in what is now Bangladesh stands as one of the cardinal moral challenges of recent history, although today it is far more familiar to South Asians than to Americans. It had a monumental impact on India, Pakistan, and Bangladeshalmost a sixth of humanity in 1971. In the dark annals of modern cruelty, it ranks as bloodier than Bosnia and by some accounts in the same rough league as Rwanda. It was a defining moment for both the United States and India, where their humane principles were put to the test.4
For the United States, as Archer Blood understood, a small number of atrocities are so awful that they stand outside of the normal day-to-day flow of diplomacy: the Armenian genocide, the Holocaust, Cambodia, Bosnia, Rwanda. When we think of U.S. leaders failing the test of decency in such moments, we usually think of uncaring disengagement: Franklin Roosevelt fighting World War II without taking serious steps to try to rescue Jews from the Nazi dragnet, or Bill Clinton standing idly by during the Rwandan genocide.5
But Pakistans slaughter of its Bengalis in 1971 is starkly different. Here the United States was allied with the killers. The White House was actively and knowingly supporting a murderous regime at many of the most crucial moments. There was no question about whether the United States should intervene; it was already intervening on behalf of a military dictatorship decimating its own people.
This stands as one of the worst moments of moral blindness in U.S. foreign policy. Pakistans crackdown on the Bengalis was not routine or small-scale killing, not something that could be dismissed as business as usual, but a colossal and systematic onslaught. Midway through the bloodshed, both the Central Intelligence Agency and the State Department conservatively estimated that about two hundred thousand people had lost their lives. Many more would perish, cut down by Pakistani forces or dying in droves in miserable refugee camps. The story of East Bengal will surely be written as one of the greatest nightmares of modern times, declared Edward Kennedy, who led the outcry in the Senate. But in the depths of the Cold War, Nixon and Kissinger were unyielding in their support for Pakistan, making possible horrific crimes against humanityplausibly even a genocidein that countrys eastern wing.6
The ongoing Bengali slaughter led within a few months to a major war between Pakistan and India. In that time, the White House had every opportunity to grasp how bad these atrocities were. There were sober misgivings voiced in the White House, and thunderous protests from the State Department and its emissaries in Delhi and Dacca, with Archer Blood the loudest voice of all. But throughout it all, from the outbreak of civil war to the Bengali massacres to Pakistans crushing defeat by the Indian military, Nixon and Kissinger, unfazed by detailed knowledge of the massacres, stood stoutly behind Pakistan.
As its most important international backer, the United States had great influence over Pakistan. But at almost every turning point in the crisis, Nixon and Kissinger failed to use that leverage to avert disaster. Before the shooting started, they consciously decided not to warn Pakistans military chiefs against using violence on their own population. They did not urge caution or impose conditions that might have discouraged the Pakistani military government from butchering its own citizenry. They did not threaten the loss of U.S. support or even sanctions if Pakistan took the wrong course. They allowed the army to sweep aside the results of Pakistans first truly free and fair democratic election, without even suggesting that the military strongmen try to work out a power-sharing deal with the Bengali leadership that had won the vote. They did not ask that Pakistan refrain from using U.S. weaponry to slaughter civilians, even though that could have impeded the militarys rampage, and might have deterred the army. There was no public condemnationnor even a private threat of itfrom the president, the secretary of state, or other senior officials. The administration almost entirely contented itself with making gentle, token suggestions behind closed doors that Pakistan might lessen its brutalityand even that only after, months into the violence, it became clear that India was on the brink of attacking Pakistan.
This might give the impression of passivity, of a foreign policy on autopilot. Not so. Nixon and Kissinger actually drove their South Asia policies with gusto and impressive creativitybut only when silencing dissenters in the ranks, like Blood, or pursuing their hostility toward India. They found no appeal in India, neither out of ideological admiration for Indias flawed but functioning democracy, nor from a geopolitical appreciation of the sheer size and importance of the Indian colossus. Instead, they denounced Indians individually and collectively, with an astonishingly personal and crude stream of vitriol. Alone in the Oval Office, these famous practitioners of dispassionate realpolitik were all too often propelled by emotion.
The slaughter happened at the same time that Nixon and Kissinger were planning their opening to Chinaa famous historic achievement that has a forgotten cost. Everyone remembers Nixon and Kissingers months of clandestine Chinese diplomacy, followed by the amazing spectacle of the presidential visit to Mao Zedong. But what has been lost is the human toll exacted for it in Bangladesh and India. Nixon and Kissinger needed a secret channel to China, which they found in the good offices of Yahyaan impeccably discreet tyrant on warm terms with both the United States and China. While the Pakistani government was crushing the Bengalis, it was also carrying covert messages back and forth from Washington to Beijing. Archer Blood sent off his dissent telegram just three months before Kissinger took his first secret trip to Beijing, flying direct from Pakistan, which sped him on his way with hospitality, an airplane, and a cloak-and-dagger cover story. Nixon and Kissinger, always sympathetic to the Pakistani junta, were not about to condemn it while it was making itself so useful. So the Bengalis became collateral damage for realigning the global balance of power. In the bargain, Nixon and Kissinger also turned their backs on India: the strategic opening to one Asian titan meant a closing to another. Indeed, one of the very first things that the United States did with its new relationship with Maos China was to secretly ask it to mobilize troops to threaten democratic India, in defense of Pakistan. It is absolutely right that the normalization of the American relationship with China stands as an epochal event, but those who justifiably want to celebrate it should not overlook what it meant for the Bengalis and Indians.
Kissinger and his defenders often try to shift the blame to Nixon. But the record here proves that Kissinger was almost as culpable as the president. When dealing with the White House and State Department staff, Kissinger would entertain a variety of viewpoints, showing his trademark subtlety, although pressing an anti-Indian line. But when it was just him and Nixon alone, he cannily stoked the presidents fury. All the sophistication vanished, replaced with a relentless drumbeat against India. Although Kissinger billed himself around Washington as a vital restraint on Nixons dangerous moods, here it was Kissinger who spun out of control. In the most heated moments of the crisis, when Nixon lost his nerve for a superpower confrontation with the Soviet Union that at worst could have led toward nuclear war, Kissinger goaded him on.
Nixon and Kissinger bear responsibility for a significant complicity in the slaughter of the Bengalis. This overlooked episode deserves to be a defining part of their historical reputations. But although Nixon and Kissinger have hardly been neglected by history, this major incident has largely been whitewashed out of their legacyand not by accident. Kissinger began telling demonstrable falsehoods about the administrations record just two weeks into the crisis, and has not stopped distorting since. Nixon and Kissinger, in their vigorous efforts after Watergate to rehabilitate their own respectability as foreign policy wizards, have left us a farrago of distortions, half-truths, and outright lies about their policy toward the Bengali atrocities.7
To this day, four decades after the massacres, the dead hand of Nixonian cover-up still prevents Americans from knowing the full record. The White House staff routinely sanitized their records of conversations, sometimes at Kissingers specific urging. Even now, mildewed and bogus claims of national security remain in place to bleep out particularly embarrassing portions of the White House tapes. Kissinger struck a deal with the Library of Congress that, until five years after his death, blocks researchers from seeing his papers there unless they have his written permission. Even if you could get in, according to the Library of Congress, many of Kissingers most important papers are still hidden from daylight by a thicket of high-level classifications, security clearances, and need-to-know permissions. Kissinger did not reply to two polite requests for an interview, and then, four months later, refused outright. But against Nixon and Kissingers own misrepresentations and immortal stonewalling, there is a different story to be found in thousands of pages of recently declassified U.S. papers, in dusty Indian archives, and on unheard hours of the White House tapesoffering a more accurate, documented account of Nixon and Kissingers secret role in backing the perpetrators of one of the worst crimes of the twentieth century.8

It was left to India, which did not have the option of ignoring the slaughter of the Bengalis, to stop it. The gargantuan democracy was entwined with the tragedy next door in countless ways, from its own shocked Bengali population to its bitter confrontation with Pakistan. Indira Gandhis government was motivated by a mix of lofty principle and brutal realpolitik: demanding an end to the slaughter of a civilian population and upholding the popular will of voters in a democratic election, but also seizing a prime opportunity to humiliate and rip apart Indias hated enemy.
Indira Gandhi, Indias prime minister and the great Jawaharlal Nehrus daughter, would later claim she acted first of all, for purely humanitarian reasons. Indias ambassador at the United Nations declared that his country had absolutely nothing but the purest of motives and the purest of intentions: to rescue the people of East Bengal. But there was nothing pure about the protection of human rights. Some eminent political theorists and international lawyers have pointed to Indias intervention as a singular and important case of an Asian postcolonial country launching a humanitarian interventiona kind of war more commonly associated with Western military campaigns in Bosnia, Kosovo, and Libya. But there has been no proper chronicle of Indias real motives.9
In fact, Indira Gandhi and her top advisers were coldly calculating strategists, even if their actions served a humane cause. India put itself in a position of breathtaking hypocrisy: demanding freedom for the Bengali people in East Pakistan, while conducting its own repression of restive populations under Indian control in Kashmir, as well as lesser-known groups like the Mizos and Nagas andwith painful irony leftist Bengalis within Indias own volatile state of West Bengal. While the Indian government emotionally spoke out on behalf of the millions of Bengalis who fled into India, its officials privately worried that these exiles might be radical subversives who would fuel more unrest and revolt in Indias already shaky border states, especially West Bengal. India, in other words, was driven not just by sympathy for Bengalis, but also a certain amount of fear of revolutionary Bengalis.
While Indira Gandhis government professed its unwavering desire for peace, she almost immediately turned to aggressive options. From the early days of the Pakistani crackdown, she had the Indian military covertly prepare for a full-scale regular war against Pakistan. India secretly had its army and security forces use bases on Indian soil to support Bengali guerrillas in their fight against the Pakistani state. India devoted enormous resources to covertly sponsoring the Bengali insurgency inside East Pakistan, providing the guerrillas with arms, training, camps, and safe passage back and forth across a porous border. Indian officials, from Gandhi on down, evaded or lied with verve, denying that they were maintaining the insurgency. But in fact, as Indias own secret records prove, this massive clandestine enterprise was approved at the highest levels, involving Indias intelligence services, border security forces, and army.
In the event, Pakistan rashly struck the first blow of a full-scale conventional war, with a surprise air attack in December 1971 that brought fierce combat in both West and East Pakistan. But while Indians today generally remember the war as outright Pakistani aggression, Indias actual path to war shows a great degree of Indian responsibility as well. India knew it had a fearsome military advantage, and Gandhis government used that ruthlessly. According to senior Indian generals, Gandhi wanted her forces to go to war not long after the start of Pakistans crackdown, and had to be persuaded to wait for cooler fighting weather and more time to train. While the Indian military waited for winter, the Indian-backed insurgency bled the Pakistan army, leaving it demoralized and stretched thin. Indias support for the Bengali rebels led to border clashes with Pakistani troops, and, as winter approached, to several substantial Indian incursions onto Pakistani territory. It is a patriotic delusion to imagine, as some Indian nationalists do today, that Pakistans airstrikes were unprovoked. Still, Pakistans air attack was a final act of folly for the military dictatorship. The war, fought in just two weeks, ended with a resounding Indian victory, and created the fledgling state of Bangladesh.

The president and the prime minister, in Washington and Delhi, were united by their need to grapple with their own democratic societies. As much as Nixon and Gandhi loathed each other, they shared a common exasperation at how their policies could be thwarted by their own peoplea frustration that would in time lead both of them down their own different but alarmingly antidemocratic paths. In these two great democracies, it was not just governments but also peoples who had to confront one of the worst events of their century. Americans and Indians were challenged to make policy in a way that expressed their national sense of morality, not just their strategic interests.
The United States and India are radically different societies, in everything from wealth to ethnic composition to sheer size of population; but they do share some basic similarities in their systems of democratic governance. In both, democratic leaders were goaded and prodded by rambunctious elements at home: a free press with an ingrained habit of seeking out inconvenient or embarrassing stories; opposition politicians and partisans waiting to pounce should a president or prime minister stumble; and a public whose moral sensibilities often did not align with the dictates of the states cold calculus of strategic interest. In both of these enormous democracies, the people were more moralistic than their governments.10
Americans reacted with disquiet or horror. The countrys far-reaching newspapers and broadcast networks reported in shocking detail about these distant atrocities; ordinary Americans recoiled at what they learned on the news; and politicians in Congress, led by Edward Kennedy, seized the opportunity to politick against the White House. Thus even this White House found itself unable to continue its unstinting support of Pakistan through arms sales, which Kissinger would have liked to escalate, because of pressure from Congress and bureaucratic maneuvering by the State Department. Nixon and Kissinger found themselves boxed in by their countrys liberal and democratic system; they had to moderate their policies, much against their will. As Kissinger complained to the president, We are the ones who have been operating against our public opinion, against our bureaucracy, at the very edge of legality.11
A little further than that, actually. Nixon and Kissinger responded to these legal and democratic constraints on their authority in the classic Nixonian way: by breaking the law. Knowing full well that they were acting illegally, they provided U.S. weapons to Pakistan, which was under a U.S. arms embargoan unknown scandal that is of a piece with the overall pattern of lawlessness that culminated with Watergate. As recently declassified documents and transcripts prove, Nixon and Kissinger approved a covert supply of sophisticated U.S. fighter airplanes via Jordan and Irandespite explicit and emphatic warnings from both the State Department and the Defense Department that such arms transfers to Pakistan were illegal under U.S. law. (John Mitchell, the attorney general, was in the room as Nixon and Kissinger decided on this unlawful operation, but made no objections.) Kissinger, not wanting to get caught, made it clear to the president that they were both breaking the law. Nixon went ahead anyway.
Americans sense of outrage circulated within the administration itself. The most vociferous dissenter was Archer Blood, but he had no shortage of company. The ambassador to India, a distinguished former Republican senator named Kenneth Keating, took his opposition all the way to the Oval Office, where he confronted Nixon and Kissinger to their faces over what he called genocide. The middle ranks of the State Department, stationed in Washington, Dacca, Delhi, and even parts of West Pakistan, rose up in open defiance of the policies of the president of the United States. There were even rumblings of discontent within the National Security Council at the White House itself.
Although Nixon and Kissinger frequently sparred with the State Department over all sorts of issues, here the clash was out in the open, with an unsurpassed gulf in views of policy and morality. The State Department outfoxed Nixon and Kissinger, quietly using its bureaucratic power to jam the shipment of U.S. weaponry to Pakistan. In response, Nixon and Kissinger raged against the bureaucracy and tried to fire or demote some of the most influential dissenters, foremost among them Blood and Keating. The president and his national security advisor plowed ahead with their support of Pakistan as best they could, but were impeded by the consciences and the best advice of a surprisingly large chunk of their own administration.
There was no real question of the United States going to war to stop the slaughter. In 1971, there was no American equivalent of todays debates about humanitarian intervention in places like Bosnia and Darfur. After all, the country was already fighting a major war, trapped in the quagmire of Vietnam; there was no American appetite for another Asian conflict. Thus the leading critics of the Nixon administration, like Kennedy, linked Vietnam with Pakistan: two places where the United States was standing behind illegitimate governments, at a terrible cost to those peoples, and to the good name of the United States. American dissenters like Blood and Keating, as well as outraged political rivals like Kennedy, only wanted to see American influence repurposed to support democracy and human rights. Of course, they expected that a war would put an end to the slaughterbut that would be waged by India.
In the United States today, particularly after the disasters of the Iraq war, there are many thoughtful and serious people who criticize the promotion of human rights as arrogance, neoimperialism, and worse. No doubt, there are potent reasons for caution about trying to translate human rights ideals into statecraft. But this largely forgotten crisis, unfolding far from Washington, exemplifies an alternative way of making U.S. foreign policy, one that makes no allowance for human rights. This kind of policy has shown itself in the U.S. war against terror and may well reappear in future diplomacy. For all the very real flaws of human rights politics, Nixon and Kissingers support of a military dictatorship engaged in mass murder is a reminder of what the world can easily look like without any concern for the pain of distant strangers.12

The stakes were high for Indias democracy. Sunil Khilnani, a farsighted India expert, argues powerfully that India is the most important experiment in democracy since the American and French revolutions: its outcome may well turn out to be the most significant of them all, partly because of its sheer human scale, and partly because of its location, a substantial bridgehead of effervescent liberty on the Asian continent. Nobody would idealize Indias flawed democracy, least of all Indians themselves: this was and is a land of heartbreaking poverty, endemic corruption, collapsing infrastructure, enduring caste fissures, arrogant bureaucratic inefficiency, and shocking social inequality. Some 350 million Indiansroughly a third of the countrys populationtoday live below the poverty line. But this is also a country of stupendous pluralism and vitality that, against all odds, maintains a democratic system and culture, offering a way for a fractious public to make its multitudinous voices heard and a chance for the government to correct itself.13
Indians were overwhelmingly outraged by the atrocities in East Pakistan. In a factionalized country where popular harmony is a surpassingly rare thing, there was a remarkable consensus: Pakistan was behaving horrifically; the Bengalis were in the right; India had to act in defense of democracy and innocent lives. Almost the entire Indian political spectrum, from Hindu nationalists on the right to socialists and communists on the left, lined up behind the Bengalis. These persecuted foreigners were not Indian citizens, but they were not altogether foreign; Bengalis were a familiar part of the Indian national scene, and Indias own Bengali population rallied to their brethren. Across the country, newspapers ran furious editorials condemning Pakistan and urging the Indian government to recognize Bangladeshs independence.
Dismissing the niceties of national sovereignty in the cause of saving human beings and of respecting the popular will of the Bengalis, Indians demanded a swift recognition of an independent state of Bangladesh. Of course, since the bloody days of Partition, a great many Indians hated and feared Pakistan; plenty took a kind of angry satisfaction in lambasting Pakistani leaders like Yahya and Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto for confirming all the worst things that Indians had ever said about Pakistan. But there was a moral sensibility driving Indian politics that even the gimlet-eyed officials around Indira Gandhi, and the unsentimental Gandhi herself, could not ignore. She abandoned her father Nehrus traditional anticolonial pronouncements about the sanctity of national sovereignty. Instead, the beleaguered prime minister began to compare the bloodshed in East Pakistan to the Holocaust.
Perhaps the most striking Indian policy was something that it did not do. India did not stop masses of Bengali refugees from flooding into India. Unimaginably huge numbers of Bengalis escaped into safety on Indian soil, eventually totaling as many as ten millionfive times the number of people displaced in Bosnia in the 1990s. The needs of this new, desperate population were far beyond the capacities of the feeble governments of Indias border states, and Indira Gandhis government at the center. But at that overcharged moment, the Indian public would have found it hard to accept the sight of its own soldiers and border troops opening fire to keep out these desperate and terrified people. Here, at least, was something like real humanitarianism. As payment for this kindness, India found itself crushed under the unsustainable burden of one of the biggest refugee flows in world history which galvanized the public and the government to new heights of self-righteous fury against Pakistan.
India was left alone. Despite pleas to the rest of the world, India was given only a tiny amount of money to cope with the refugees. China was bitterly hostile; the United States only somewhat less so; the Non-Aligned Movement was, in the clutch, of no help; Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the other Arab states were fiercely pro-Pakistan; even the United Nations seemed tilted toward Pakistan. India was forced into a tighter alignment with the Soviet Union, to the delight of leftists around Gandhi, but to the dismay of other Indians. Having been shoved aside by the democratic superpower, India cozied up to the other one.
As India grows into a world power, the story of the birth of Bangladesh has never been more important. It stands as an awful but crucial case for better understanding the politics of human rights, in a world where the duty of defending the vulnerable is not something that the West arrogates for itself alone. Today, at the advent of an Asian era in world politics, the future of human rights will increasingly depend on the ideologies, institutions, and cultures of ascendant Asian great powers like China and India. Thus Indias democratic response to the plight of the Bengalis marks not just a pivotal moment for the history of the subcontinent, but for how the worlds biggest democracy makes its foreign policyand what weight it gives to human rights.
For Pakistan, the crisis of 1971 is mourned as a supreme national trauma: not just the loss of one of the countrys two wings and the majority of its population, but a heightening of a truncated states dread of the much larger and stronger Indian enemy. And the bloodletting of 1971 marks an important chapter of a U.S. embrace of military dictators at their worst. Although American popular memory about Pakistan tends to start in September 2001, it was Nixons embrace of Yahya that helped to define a U.S. relationship with Pakistan based overwhelmingly on the military, even in its most repugnant hour. Nixon and Kissinger set the stage for an ongoing decimation of Pakistans democratic opposition, giving time and space to Islamicize the country more and more. This pattern of U.S. antidemocratic engagement with origins going back far beyond Pervez Musharraf, Pakistans most recent U.S.-backed military dictatorhas helped convince so many Pakistanis that the United States coldly pursues its own realpolitik interests and cares nothing for them.
Bangladeshis still mourn their losses from not so long ago. This book is notand does not purport to beanything like a comprehensive account of these crimes against humanity. It mostly documents the American eyewitness perspective on them, which is obviously only a part of the complete record of horrors. Still, this is an important portion, because it is the true local viewpoint of the Pakistani governments superpower ally. After all, Archer Blood and the other U.S. officials reporting back to the Nixon administration knew they had every career incentive to downplay the enormity of what they saw; their stark reporting thus stands as a crucial and credible part of that wider story.
Today we still face the legacy of Nixon and Kissingers actions. Bangladesh, traumatized by its founding ordeal, now has the eighth-largest population on earth, bigger than Russia or Japan. With India creakily becoming a great power, and with ongoing conflict in Afghanistan and Kashmir that directly affects the United States in its war against Islamist terror, its widely understood that South Asia has never been more important to Americans. But there is a gulf between what Americans remember of the Cold War and what its victims remember of it. Indians, Pakistanis, and Bangladeshis have not forgotten 1971although they may be surprised by the newly declassified scope of the United States dark record.14
Nixon and Kissinger have put extraordinary effort into magnifying their foreign policy achievements, so that the horrors of Watergate would appear as a smallish blot on their overall record. Today, Nixon and Kissingers biggest success in promoting themselves as foreign policy heroes has been the historical oblivion that surrounds the killing campaign in Bangladesh. It is high time for Americans to confront what Nixon and Kissinger did in those terrible days.